In my previous post the machine was disassembled and the battery removed. Since then I’ve been coming back to this machine on and off over the last week. In this post we dig a bit further to see if we can get the machine running.

Boot Disk

Before I take a look further at the motherboard I wanted to take a look at the boot disk. I have a Greaseweazle which allows floppy drives to be connected to a USB port along with tools to read disks at a very low level. This is much better than using a stock USB floppy drive, which is usually too abstracted away to be able to read things such as Amiga floppy disks.

I found a drive which has been quite reliable to do this and read the disk.

There were a few sectors which were not readable, but I managed to get an image of the disk which is below (in case anyone needs it). Looking at the contents it appears to be somewhat Euro PC specific. You can download it from my Downloads page.

To make sure this would boot, I use Bochs to boot an emulated PC from the disk. At this stage I still haven’t figured out if any files on the disk are corrupted due to the sectors that couldn’t be read, but it booted without issue. It was a little weird to use because the keyboard mapping was German based, which I guess is to be expected. I’m guessing the Euro PC hardware remaps the QWERTY keyboard to the German layout.

One of the most important things on the disk was a file called “SETUP.EXE”. This is a tool to configure the BIOS of the Euro PC from DOS. It was worth backing up the disk for this alone. Saving the settings causes Bochs to become no longer bootable, which is probably to be expected, it is a very different BIOS. Interestingly the clock was running incredibly fast (this schreenshot below was taken a couple of hours before the time shown). I haven’t used Bochs much so I’m guessing it is something to do with the emulation.

Battery Cleanup

I had previously snipped the battery from the motherboard, but I still needed to remove the bits of metal left behind. For this, I broke out the Hakko FR-410 desoldering gun. It made light work of what remained.

I built a version of my low-loss battery mod on long wires so that when I solder it to the PCB the battery can be in the ISA card bay area for ease of changing at a later date. I don’t want to fit this just yet, I want to see if the machine is bootable first.

Video

As this is a TTL CGA/MDA output from the machine, I couldn’t just hook up a VGA cable and cross my fingers. This machine requires a little conversion to generate the right picture. I could have knocked up something hacky myself but I decided to get something I’d use more long-term. I ended up ordering an RGBtoHDMI board with a TTL adaptor and a CGA2SCART Pro, which both happened to arrive on the same day.

I decided to use the RGBtoHDMI, partly due to the fact I have everything setup for testing Amiga RGBtoHDMI models, and partly down to not being able to find a SCART<->SCART cable in my workshop at the time.

Power!

With that hooked up, it is time to power-on and see what happens…

That is a surprisingly good outcome, I was expecting a lot of errors due to the battery missing and the beeping I was hearing. I’m a little concerned about the RAM counter, but maybe that is a default size when the BIOS settings are at their default?

Either way I’m happy to get this far. To wrap things up this time I quickly checked the thermals to see if anything was obviously bad.

The CPU is running a little hot, but I’m going to be changing that for an NEC V20 at a later date which should run a little cooler. The logic chips above the RAM are a little warm too, I don’t think they are bad though. I was looking for hot RAM chips anyway and I don’t see any of those.

Next time I’ll hook up the keyboard and battery as well and see if we can get any further.

6 responses to “Schneider Euro PC: Restoration Part 2”

  1. […] time I got as far as the Euro PC showing tons of BIOS errors on the screen, which is a good first step. This time I try to get a little […]

  2. Hi! I’m trying to restore an old EuroPC like yours, but mine with spanish keyboard and external 5.25″ drive. I’m having the same problems with the Varta battery (already removed).
    Now, what I need is a copy of the original disks that came with the machine. I downloaded your file “euro-pc-dos-33”, but it seems to be a text config file, not a disk image. Please, where to download your disk image, or another similar one?
    Thanks in advance! And congrats for your blog, with lots of quite useful info!

    1. Hi Jorge,
      Thank you for your comments.
      I’m sorry about that, I wasn’t aware that the file was bad. I’ll fix it tomorrow and will email you the corrected file.

  3. i’m trying to boot my schneider europc2

    i already fixed the rtc, replaced the oscillator, put cr2032 with a diode, repaired the keyboard which had all the traces broken and it runs just fine

    i still have problems with it

    when i run it without the battery, it detects 512+256 K of RAM but when I save whatever I set in bios, it just hangs on testing 64K and won’t let me assign more.

    do you have any idea what should i do?

    1. I’ve not tried the EuroPC 2 yet, but I would definitely recommend that you make sure you have the correct version of the BIOS tool (I think 1.32?). The wrong one will set the wrong values when they are read back by the machine. Also, make sure all of the settings are valid. I remember I had issues after using the tool due I think to the LPT port settings.
      Alternatively, it is possible that the BIOS chip is bad. I’ve heard of that happening on various machines, but never experienced it myself.

  4. My europc2 had 3.01 bios and since the UV window was a little bit uncovered, I decided to flash the very same version onto a new eprom.

    Maybe I should try with the old chip since I never been able to save settings before replacing BIOS.

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